A graphic designer should be capable of designing an avatar for themselves instead of using AI slop that rips off Studio Ghibli. I closed the page as soon as I saw that.
Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
291–300 of 340 posts
Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#292Wow. Beyond anything, my main take away is *do not try to mimic [wW]indows [xX][pP] in any way*. I will never ever ever get it right enough. Stick to Windows 95 or earlier.
Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#293Love that the hidden 10x zoom in Paint is there and works :).
Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#294Great job! Working on mobile is really a nice touch!
thank you!
Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#295It’s neat: I like it a lot actually. But the problem with you billing yourself as a graphic designer and reimplementing Windows XP is that you’re copying a design that already exists rather than showcasing your own design skills, so I can’t immediately tell how good a designer you are[0]. I can look at your projects under the IE icon, which gives more of an impression, but some of the visuals there do look decidedly…
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Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#296It’s neat: I like it a lot actually. But the problem with you billing yourself as a graphic designer and reimplementing Windows XP is that you’re copying a design that already exists rather than showcasing your own design skills, so I can’t immediately tell how good a designer you are[0]. I can look at your projects under the IE icon, which gives more of an impression, but some of the visuals there do look decidedly…
> Literally, I could do this, and I suck at design. Are you sure about that? I've seen plenty of imitation XP interfaces in my day, and there are virtually always elements that are jarringly wrong. While I won't claim that MitchIvin XP is a faithful reproduction of XP, in the sense that one could compile a long list of inconsistencies with Windows XP, the experience is pleasant enough.
I think their point is that the skills of making a website which looks like Windows XP is adjacent to the skills needed to be a good graphic designer.
Pretty much most days I am the person who is taking a design from a designer and reimplementing that in HTML/CSS. I couldn't tell you where to start when creating a design, but as far as taking something someone else has created and reimplementing it in code? I can do that all day long.
The visual guidelines PDF exists http://interface.free.fr/Archives/GUI_Xp.pdf and turning that into a web page is just a matter of creating some DOM elements with the right sizing, margins, padding, fonts, borders, etc.
Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#297"Dyanamic" typo. otherwise, cool, nice, great work!
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Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows (or anything) is nice when its fast. Most things should work in under 20ms so I don't notice a delay.
20ms is faster than a fly reaction time, it's about the same time which 60HZ monitor takes to refresh the frame, 10 times faster than a typical human's reaction. Everything under 150 ms is pretty much indistinguishably fast to a normal person.
I uh guess I’m not a normal person then
Working with soft synths, the difference between 65ms, to 15ms latency, 8ms latency, and 2ms latency - time from pressing the key to speakers emitting the sound - is agonizingly noticeable.
The numbers I’m quoting are ones I remember from various gear and upgrades over the years. It’s crazy to think about the levels of latency I was stuck with when I was a poor college kid. These days I wouldn’t settle for more than 10ms latency, and I don’t have to, thank the maker.
Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#299> A faithful XP-inspired interface, custom-built to showcase my [...] attention to detail. Here goes: 1. "Welcome" on the login screen should be lowercase 2. Balloon is too high (should touch the icon), close icon is too small (should be roughly the same height as the balloon title) 3. About Me is missing the scrollbar on Firefox 4. Wrong gradient for "Social Links" 5. Start menu should have a shadow 6. In My Project…
Also missed that double clicking the icon in the top left of the title bar closes the window. It does not toggle maximization like clicking the rest of the title bar does.
Fun-fact: that's a relic of Windows 3.1, where the close button was exactly in the top left corner of each window.
Too bad most new Windows 10+ apps don't support that anymore.
Re: Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
#300Get rid of the AI profile picture. Just use the picture on your resume! That AI one means a good chunk of people will hate this website before they even click your name to "login" due to their own preexisting biases. As an artist myself I'm not happy about how AI companies have shamelessly plagiarized people's work. The fact you're using the same Studio Ghibli style everyone else is using just feels unoriginal. Whether employers would care is another story entirely.
Others have left good feedback regarding the UI inconsistencies that you should address.
If you really want this to reflect on your abilities as a graphic designer, you should make this "themeable." XP had multiple visual styles - there were variants of Luna, as well as the Royale theme that came with Media Center Edition, and other themes like the Zune theme. There were also numerous third-party user-created themes you could download and use (if you installed a dll patch).
You should consider adding a few of the standard themes - at the very least the silver, olive, and royale themes. But more importantly, you should make your own themes, and add them as options as well. Open up a dialog similar to XP's "Appearance" dialog on first run so users instantly know they will have that option.
It's great if you can recreate a user interface... but anyone can do that and many already have. What matters more is how you can build on the UI while remaining true to its design language and interaction paradigms. What uniqueness can you add to the UI?
Here are some links for inspiration:
- One example of this sort of thing is https://macthemes.garden/, which has thousands of Mac OS 8/9 themes.
- Here's the wikipedia article that goes over the first party XP themes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles
- For examples of XP third party themes... I don't know any good websites off the top of my head but DeviantArt has had lots of 3rd party themes and style assets uploaded to it over the years (for both Windows and macOS): https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=windows+xp+themes
Use these as inspiration and come up with your own unique visual styles which would still feel at home with Windows XP. If you can do that, I think it will really impress people.